It’s been a bad week. The moral is probably something like “never buy a car during Mercury Retrograde”, but I honestly don’t have much of a choice.

A phone call to the insurance company on Saturday resulted in nothing going through except for charges—which meant paying to insure a car without any coverage. I had to call on Monday to do it all over again. So many errands just for misplaced paperwork. Yesterday, I went to register the car at the DMV, but didn’t have proof of the seller’s status as executrix of the deceased owner’s estate. So I ran off to get such proof from her and returned with a photocopy, only to find out that the DMV would only recognize the security-embossed original document.

And this is just buying a car—when I sat down to write this post, internet service completely ceased for an hour.

Mercury Retrograde. Bad luck. Whatever you want to call it, it’s unpleasant. But it is also, to some extent, both inevitable and without guarantee. Continue reading L is for Luck→

I confess to having set a few unspoken rules for what I would and wouldn’t write about in this blog, and I am breaking quite a few of them by writing this post. First, I had sworn to try to write about topics I did not think anyone else would be writing about. Godspouses are a topic written about frequently, usually in the form of a rant (whether for or against them), though for some reason this year saw only one post about them. Second, I wanted to avoid writing about any controversial topics if I felt I had nothing new to add to the conversation. Godspouses are about as controversial as you can get.

Even so, it turns out to be an unavoidable topic. Godspouses are an integral element of faith in my practice. I am not a godspouse, but godspouses are present in what little lore I have to practice from. I cannot in good conscience accept as true the experience of those who are written about while dismissing the otherwise identical experience of those who are not in lore.

Gemstone and other mineral associations with deities are hardly uncommon among pagans. I’m no exception—I strongly associate labradorite with the god I worship. Labradorite is well-known among those who do crystal work, with a reputation for strengthening intuition and dispelling illusions. Still, this is not why I have my association. The real reason is the property of labradorescence—the shining blue luster that appears at particular angles with a piece of labradorite.

I’ve mentioned before that my god created a land of the dead for his two sons after they died, and that it is a temporary residence for most. When the land was new, the first of the dead chose the eldest son of the god as their king.

I confess to being completely and utterly stuck as to what to write about that starts with “J”. I might have to pass on this letter, and use the time to write some make-up posts for letters I previously missed. Sorry.

The words are long and latinate, but the concept itself is simple. If gods exist, where are they? Where do spirits dwell? If you believe they exist within the same world that we exist in, you are saying they are immanent. If gods and spirits dwell completely beyond the physical realm, and we must leave the physical to interact with them, your belief is that they are transcendent.